Category: Team VidMob

This past year has given us so much to be grateful for. From opening new offices in Chicago and Los Angeles to ramping up relationships with our awesome partners, it has a been a milestone year for us as a company. And we couldn’t have gotten here without your enduring support!

Here’s a brief roundup of our most memorable stories as we reflect on 2017:

My, how time flies! Two years ago this month, we launched our mobile app. A year ago this month, we launched our desktop app. This month, we are so proud to announce that we’ve raised our Series A funding.

What this means to our team, our creator community, and all those who have believed in us from the get-go is hard to put into words. We’re super excited about building out an even stronger team across our four locations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Massachusetts. And we’re eager to ramp up our ability help even more companies, agencies, and brands improve their video production efforts and make human creativity scalable.

A very special thanks to our Series A round investors, including Manifest Investment Partners, Interlock Partners, Stampede Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners, and Macanta Investments.

Earlier this week we invited a group of our LA-based creators to swing by our new office in West Hollywood and get to know some of the VidMob team. We feasted on hearty barbeque and sipped on cocktails, as we learned more about the talented people that make up our community.

We were blown away by the enthusiasm and above-and-beyond dedication of our creators. Their excitement and passion for what we’re building, their insights for how to grow the platform, and their down-for-anything hustle meant so much to hear in person. We’re so lucky to have them on our team!

It was also great to see both old and new faces alike—from those that have been with us from the very start and those who’ve recently joined the ranks. Providing an opportunity for our creators to meet in person and get to know one another was a fantastic way to not only learn more about the similarities and differences, but also to foster our growing creator community.

Even VidMob West’s office pup, Burt, got in on the action.

Many thanks to all who attended! We feel so lucky and energized after meeting with our community. We learned a great deal by getting everyone together to share their stories, discuss how they use the platform, and get to know one another. We can’t wait to announce some of the exciting updates we have coming your way as a result of this event, and we look forward to hosting our next meet-and-greet!

Stay tuned for our next creator mixer, which will be held at our headquarters in NYC. Want to attend? Reach out to us at support@vidmob.com to get on the invite list and receive event updates.

Our west coast team is growing fast (we’re hiring!), so it was high time for an office space upgrade to accommodate. We’re excited to share with you a little behind-the-scenes tour of VidMob West’s new home base.

Take the Office Tour

Nestled at the base of the Hollywood Hills, VidMob West secured a spacious condo and converted into a pretty rad place to work.

The big, open-air layout and high ceilings allow for plenty of energizing California sunshine and blue sky views—with the added bennie of a conference room that overlooks a pool!

The industrial-mod decor gives the space a streamlined, polished look, while the pops of teal are a bright nod to the vibrancy of the nearby Pacific coast.

But the best part has got to be the killer vinyl selection, brightening the background noise.

And, of course, the company of resident office pooch, Burt!

For even more office pics, check out the gallery below.

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We’d love to hear what you think of the new space. Drop us a line in the comments below or get in touch at support@vidmob.com. Want to join the team? Check out these positions!

Recently, Team VidMob and other #Promote finalists spent two days at @TwitterNYC to discuss the state of advertising on Twitter. The contest brought together nine finalists in three different categories, all with the aim of providing turnkey solutions for marketers to tap into Twitter’s global audience.

Here are a few photos and highlights of the event:

We had a great time meeting with and presenting to a variety of decision-makers within Twitter as well as our fellow Twitter partners.

We dove into the different ways Twitter and other partners are solving challenges for today’s digital advertisers.

Our CEO, Alex Collmer, went to great heights (pun intended!) to stand beside contest winners, David Shadpour from Social Native in the Content + Creative category, and CyberAgent team in the Ad Tech category.

Overall, our time spent participating in the #Promote contest was a fantastic experience for the team and we are so grateful to have been a part of it. We eagerly look forward to working with Twitter and are thrilled to help advertisers effectively engage with Twitter’s global audience.

An Old Dinner

All the guests arrived on time. The whole team was there—all the developers, who had labored for years to build an innovative product, and their new CEO, who had recently purchased the company and flown in from out of town for the night.

The food was delicious, cooked to perfection and coupled with precision, with a mix of made-to-order cocktails and paired wines. In short, everything went off without a hitch. But then again, is there any surprise in that? After all, what’s a small dinner at your home with its handful of critical path items, a few dependent tasks, and a semi-flexible delivery hour?

For a team that regularly handles infinitely more challenging coordination problems with hundreds of tasks per week, all with interlocking dependencies, getting a well-cooked steak on the table in time to keep your team from knifing each other didn’t even require a JIRA task. And as the team lead and his wife reminisced after all of the dishes were done and the guests had all gone home, all they could think about was how perfect this night had been. The signs were definitely positive. Maybe this new management would actually work out.

The following morning, the team arrived in the office still basking in the hopeful glow of a night gone right. Sitting at the top of the company’s internal blog, they found an article posted by the CEO. Expecting it to be some sort of public thank you, one by one they all began to read. And one by one, their jaws dropped. It started out all right. The opening sentences were all about how the meal was great, and how it was clear throughout the evening that the team cared about each other, got along well, and generally operated like a family. It was the next line, though, that stopped them in their tracks:

“But who cares…”

But who cares, dot dot dot. The CEO went on from there to flip the tone entirely. None of the preceding mattered. He did not care in the least that they enjoyed working together. He did not care that they had forged a positive work environment over years of execution. He did not care about any of this. All that mattered was the work, and the more they liked each other, the harder it was going to be to fire people in the months ahead.

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the company mentioned above lost a significant portion of its development team shortly after that night. The company hasn’t grown in years and likely won’t grow anytime before it shuts its doors for the last time. And when that day comes, the management of the company will have only itself to blame.

The world is changing. And companies that don’t realize the role their employees will play in that are the ones most likely to wake up one day and find that it changed without them.

The Widening Definition of Shareholder

Corporations have porous borders, and the only kind of employee you should ever want is one that has the option to leave at any moment. Even better, multiple options. Because the reality in today’s startup world is that ideas are meaningless.

That’s not to say that a company doesn’t need a good idea. It does. But with the hive brain that results from a fully connected society, you have to assume that most ideas are simultaneously had by dozens of other people. At least a few of them will start the same company as you. And the only way to survive and build a leading company is to out-innovate, out-execute, and out-hustle your competition. The key point, though, is that this cannot be done with anything other than A+ talent in every role in an organization.

And this is where the selfish side of taking care of your employees comes into play. There are countless studies that show that companies with happier employees get more patents awarded, are more productive on a per capita basis, and have lower turnover. Think attracting A+ talent is hard? Try losing them and finding a replacement, thus essentially hiring and training twice for every available position.

But there is also a less selfish side to building the right kind of organization. After two decades of increasing private equity purchases and cost rationalizations in every sector in the economy, many companies no longer see their employees and community members as important shareholders. All decisions are made to optimize for quarterly earnings, leading to less and less stability for workers. Couple this with changing health care policy at the Federal level and an awful lot of folks are feeling less comfortable than they should. Do companies need to operate like this?

Our view at VidMob is that the answer to this question is an emphatic ‘no.’ When we started the company, the long-term goal was to create a million jobs for the creators in our marketplace and, through that, hopefully positively impact people’s lives at scale. But closer to home, we wanted to build a company which was keenly aware of its multiple constituencies and cared for each of them. Our employees, our creators, our clients, our investors, and the communities within which we live and operate—they are all important “shareholders” as far as we’re concerned.

So while we certainly celebrate every big deal we close, and every time a client emails us thanking our service for a job well done, we’re equally excited that VidMob is in a position to offer some of the best health benefits available. That, and with an engineering team of eight people now in the Berkshires, we’re beginning to add real economic value to a community whose industrial heyday has passed—but has a bright future on the horizon.

A New Dinner

We recently had our own dinner in the same setting as the one mentioned above. The same home and hosts. And at least a few of the same people around the table. But the management was different, and with it, so was the way of thinking. We weren’t really celebrating anything in particular, which is often the best reason to celebrate. Perhaps a successful day prioritizing features and making sure we were all in sync in the long-term product roadmap is reason enough.

In the midst of all this, the story of the old CEO and his blog post came up. I couldn’t help but think how desperately we’d be failing in our mission if we ever felt or behaved that way. And while any one company’s ability to impact a society is limited, if thousands of companies all adopt an evolved view of their responsibility to their community, that can make an impact.

So who cares? The short answer is that VidMob does. We care for selfish reasons because we know that it will lead to a better caliber employee and better results for the company. But we also care because we recognize our role in the world around us. And if you care too,give us a call. We’re hiring.